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9 years, 5 months to build the culture that powered our $3.2B company.
Here’s some of the cultural lessons learned:
Here’s some of the cultural lessons learned:
Build a family — Eat together (for post-covid plans), celebrate holidays, go on company trips, send funny GIFs, be wacky together; As the company exceeds 50 ~people, each team will take on its own family vibe.
Make All Hands Incredible — Treat your bi-weekly all hands as a culture product; assign an owner, iterate on agenda weekly, use the time to reinforce mission/vision, annual+quarterly goals, recognize teams/teammates who exceed goals.
Build office furniture together — Another way to act like a family: assemble office furniture together 
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Jake’s first memory of Segment was my co-founder @reinpk building the roof on our first conference room.
Jake’s first memory of Segment was my co-founder @reinpk building the roof on our first conference room.
Jake’s first memory of Segment was my co-founder @reinpk building the roof on our first conference room." title="Build office furniture together — Another way to act like a family: assemble office furniture together https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🙂" title="Leicht lächelndes Gesicht" aria-label="Emoji: Leicht lächelndes Gesicht"> Jake’s first memory of Segment was my co-founder @reinpk building the roof on our first conference room.">
Jake’s first memory of Segment was my co-founder @reinpk building the roof on our first conference room." title="Build office furniture together — Another way to act like a family: assemble office furniture together https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🙂" title="Leicht lächelndes Gesicht" aria-label="Emoji: Leicht lächelndes Gesicht"> Jake’s first memory of Segment was my co-founder @reinpk building the roof on our first conference room.">
Deliver constructive feedback in the early days — adopt a 6 mo review cycle early to have managers practice giving constructive feedback frequently.
Develop a culture of “writing” — a top 3 “most surprising thing about @segment" according to new employees is how well documented the company’s ideas are. It’s the best way to onboard teammates (especially given the majority of Segment’s employees haven’t even started there yet)
Lead through data — Dashboards make software impact tangible. Set OKRs and build team-dashboards; put dashboards on TVs/monitors in your physical spaces, and constantly show dashboards off at All Hands.
Build momentum — Hit milestones & celebrate, this builds energy and momentum. A team with momentum has a much higher chance of being successful in the future.
Celebrate new customers & products — Celebrate all new customers and products in the same #shipped Slack channel. This aligns the engineering team and the sales team!
Celebrate progress too — before there’s #shipped impact, there’s months of progress which should be celebrated too!
Build culture products — think about your culture as a product, with features like All Hands, #shipped channels, holiday celebrations, team milestones, repeating recognition, etc .. The more you iterate, the stronger the overall engine becomes.
